5 Startups Working to Improve the E-Book Reading Experience

The next chapter of digital reading has begun.

In the past year, several startups have emerged with plans to change the way we discover, share and consume e-books. Some have focused on making e-books more interactive, others are trying to build more and better experiences around e-books.

Not all of these efforts may ultimately catch on with readers, but the hope is that they provide readers with more options and potentially inspire some of the bigger players in the space to innovate as well. With that in mind, here are some of the most exciting startups in the e-book space right now.

Oyster

Image courtesy of Flickr, tsmall

Oyster has been labeled the Netflix for e-books. The startup has raised an initial $3 million round of funding to build an iPhone app that will offer a curated subscription for e-books. The goal is to provide access to an unlimited number of carefully selected books for a monthly fee so that people can focus on which e-books they'd like to read rather than which e-books they'd like to buy.

"Today, book buying is centered around transaction, not purely on finding great books," the startup's founders said in a blog post announcing the service in October. "Currently, people buy books online in the exact same way that they buy lamps, blenders, and kitchen knives. The process of finding your next book is very different from purchasing a knife, and it should be treated that way."

As with most projects, the devil is in the details. Oyster has yet to reveal the pricing structure or the publishers it will partner with, but if it can offer up enough decent titles at a price point that isn't prohibitively high, the app could take off in 2013.

Ownshelf

Image courtesy of Ownshelf

Ownshelf wants to be your Dropbox for books. The website, which launched earlier this month, offers users a simple way to store and share e-books in the cloud, essentially creating a digital bookshelf. Readers can then browse and borrow books from their friend's digital libraries through the service. The goal isn't to create an illegal peer-to-peer e-book sharing service -- in fact, Ownshelf's terms of service specifically tell users to only upload books from the public domain -- but rather to take a page from the way people traditionally discover print books.

"We don't see what people read anymore because it's not piled up on their coffee table, or on their bookshelf or their night stand," Rick Marazzani, the founder of Ownshelf, told Mashable in an earlier interview. "Our goal is to replace that with something virtual, where you can get recommendations and say 'Hey, try it, read it.'"

Game of Books

If Oyster is a Netflix for e-books, then Game of Books is a Foursquare for e-books. The project attempts to gamify the reading experience for both print and digital books by letting readers earn points and badges for the books they've read. The project, which successfully raised more than $100,000 earlier this month on Kickstarter, was started by Aaron Stanton, who previously launched BookLamp, a recommendation engine for books.

A demo of the project is available on the website now and the team will start inviting feedback and tweaking the product next month. The plan is to launch apps for iPhone and Android next year that let readers scan the barcodes of physical books or search a database of physical books to find out more about its digital gaming component. Stanton told Mashable that he hopes to integrate the game more directly into e-readers so that one would automatically earn a reward when the device says they've read a certain amount of the book, though this depends more on the willingness of companies like Kobo and Amazon to partner up.

Coliloquy

Image courtesy of Coliloquy

Coliloquy makes digital books more interactive by giving the reader a say in how the plot unfolds. The startup, which launched at the beginning of this year, offers writers a platform to create "active applications" rather than static e-books. Authors can poll readers about potential storylines and personalize content to their audience. In this way, authors can potentially boost the engagement of their readers.

"With the printing press, books were designed to not be customizable," Colioquy's co-founder Lisa Rutherford told Mashable in an earlier interview. "Now e-readers give us a way to reinvent different forms of narrative and storytelling." For now, the team has focused on a select few genres of books, including romance and adventure stories.

Small Demons

Image courtesy of Small Demons

Small Demons is the website every reader has dreamed of at some point. The website, which came out of beta earlier this year, offers a detailed database of the characters, places and items mentioned in thousands of books. So, for example, you can do a search for "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and the website will pull up a map of all the places mentioned in the book, as well as lists of all the songs, gadgets and foods that pop up throughout its pages. But it doesn't stop there. You can choose to click on one of the songs mentioned and see all the other works that have mentioned it as well. This way, you can listen to the songs and visit the places that are featured in your favorite books.

Image courtesy of Flickr, kodomut.